Doctoral programs receive Carnegie review

USC has been selected as a leading partner in an effort to improve doctoral education at American universities.

The mathematics department of USC College and USC’s Rossier School of Education will join a handful of other university departments to examine doctoral programs through the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate.

This three-year project, co-sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Atlantic Philanthropies, will include analyses of doctoral programs in chemistry, education, English, history, mathematics and neuroscience, as well as departmental experiments and research.

“Doctoral programs have changed very little in the past 50 years, but the world around us has been transformed completely,” says Francis Bonahon, acting chairman of the College’s math department. “This initiative is an excellent opportunity to exchange ideas with other universities and review how we do things here at USC.”

Calling doctoral education a way “to educate and prepare those to whom we can entrust the vigor, quality and integrity of the field,” the initiative’s sponsors designed the project to allow for candid discussion and reflection.

Researchers hope it may lead to new approaches in graduate programs.

“Oftentimes, as professors, we want to clone ourselves through our students,” Bonahon says. “But we aren’t where we were 20 years ago. This is a push to think more openly and move away from that model.”

Improvements to doctoral programs, says Carnegie President Lee S. Shulman, can lead to positive changes on all other levels of education.

“If we wish to influence the course of elementary and secondary school,” says Shulman, “the Ph.D. is critical, for those who hold the doctorate also educate those who teach our nation’s schoolchildren.”